Ask an owner in Mallorca what their average spend per cover is and you will usually get a number straight away. Ask how they worked it out and the answer gets vaguer. Often it is a feeling from looking at the till at midnight, or the total divided by the number of bills, or last year's figure from the gestor.
That is fine for conversation. It is not fine if you want to know whether anything you change actually moves the money. For that you need one number, worked out the same way every time, from your own till.
The formula
Average spend per cover, or ticket medio por comensal, is:
Net sales for the period ÷ number of covers in the same period
Two words in there do most of the work.
Net sales means what you actually sold after discounts, invitations, comps and refunds. Leave out tips. Working without IVA gives you the figure that lines up with your food cost and your margins. Working with IVA included gives you what the guest actually paid. Both are valid. The only rule is to pick one and never switch. Restaurant service in Spain usually carries 10% IVA, so mixing the two between months moves your number by roughly 9–10% without a single extra coffee being sold.
Covers means people eating, not bills. This is where most of the confusion comes from.
Per bill and per cover are not the same number
A family of four on the terrace in Port de Pollença orders two paellas for the table, a jug of sangría, two Fantas and ice creams. One bill: €96 net. Your average per bill for that table is €96. Your average per cover is €24.
Both numbers are useful, but they answer different questions. Average per bill (what many tills call the average check or ticket) tells you how much a table spends. Average per cover tells you how much each person spends, which is what changes when a server suggests a starter for the table or a second glass of wine. When couples fill the room one week and families the next, the per-bill figure jumps for reasons unrelated to selling.
So when this series talks about ticket medio, it means per cover.
Step by step from the till
- Choose the period. One full week is the minimum, Monday to Sunday, so every day of the week is in there once. A single Saturday tells you about Saturdays.
- Pull net sales. Take it from the end-of-day report (the Z report or cierre de caja) or the sales summary for the date range. Check whether the figure includes IVA and whether tips are inside it.
- Pull the covers. Your till needs to be recording the number of guests when a table is opened. If it is not, see below.
- Divide. Net sales ÷ covers.
- Write it down with the rules you used. "Ex-IVA, no tips, comps excluded, week 44." In three months you will not remember, and the comparison will be worthless if the rules changed.
Which report to pull
Menu names change with updates, so check your own back office. Some pointers:
- Any Spanish TPV. The daily Z report gives you net sales and usually a ticket count. Whether it shows comensales depends on whether staff enter them when opening a table. Often the field exists and nobody fills it in.
- Square for Restaurants. Covers are only recorded once Track Seating is switched on in the device profile's Seating settings, and Square's UK help page lists cover tracking for Plus and Premium subscribers only. The Sales Summary gives net sales. Square's Section sales report (also Plus and Premium, and it needs your table map set up) splits sales by area of your floor plan, such as bar and terrace, which helps with the split described below. Expect to do the division yourself.
- Lightspeed Restaurant (K-Series). The Covers tab in Advanced Insights shows net sales, tickets, average check and covers. Note that its average check is net sales divided by tickets, not by covers, so divide net sales by the covers column yourself. Lightspeed's own help page says Advanced Insights is only available in North America, Australia and New Zealand, so a Mallorca venue may need to export sales and covers separately.
- Booking system as a cross-check. If you take reservations online, the booked guest numbers for dinner give you a rough check on what the till recorded. If the till says 40 covers and the bookings say 90, the till is wrong.
If your till does not record covers at all, fix that before anything else. Make the guest count a required step when opening a table, and spend two minutes at the pre-shift telling the team why. Until then, a tally sheet at the pass for one week is better than guessing.
Why one number for the whole day lies to you
Plenty of venues in Mallorca run two or three different businesses under one roof: a lunch service with a menú del día or quick terrace plates, a slower dinner, and a bar that serves cañas and cafés all day. Each one has its own spend per cover. Blend them and the total moves when the mix moves, even if nobody sells anything differently.
Take a worked hypothetical for one ordinary weekday:
| Service | Covers | Net sales (ex-IVA) | Spend per cover |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lunch | 60 | €1,140 | €19.00 |
| Dinner | 80 | €3,360 | €42.00 |
| Bar | 70 | €630 | €9.00 |
| Whole day | 210 | €5,130 | €24.43 |
Now say a Friday brings the same lunch and dinner, but a football match fills the bar with 140 people at the same €9 each. The whole-day figure drops to €20.57 (€5,760 ÷ 280). It looks like a bad day. It was a better day: €630 more in the till, and lunch and dinner held exactly where they were.
It also tells you where to look. If dinner sits at €42 but almost nobody is having coffee or a chupito at the end, that is a dinner question. If lunch is €19 and most tables take the menú del día with water, that is a lunch question about drinks. One blended number cannot show you either.
How to split it in practice
The cleanest way is by time. Many tills let you run the sales report for a time range, so set your own cut-offs, for example lunch 12:00 to 16:30 and dinner 19:00 to close, and keep them fixed. Anything outside those windows, plus anything rung through the bar terminal, counts as bar.
If your till can split by area or by terminal, that is even better: terrace, dining room and bar each get their own figure.
Bar covers need a rule of their own, because nobody opens a table with a guest count for two cortados at the counter. Two sensible options:
- Count each bar ticket as one cover. Imperfect, but consistent.
- Do not calculate per cover for the bar at all. Track the bar on average per ticket and keep covers for table service.
Either works. What does not work is changing the rule halfway through the season.
The mistakes that quietly ruin the number
- Tips inside net sales. Card tips can land in the same total. Strip them out.
- Every table logged as one guest. Your spend per cover suddenly looks like €70 at a pizzeria, say. It is the per-bill figure in disguise.
- Staff meals and invitations rung as sales. Either exclude them or ring them as comps, consistently.
- Children counted one week and not the next. Decide whether a child eating from the kids' menu is a cover, and stick to it.
- Split bills. Six friends paying separately makes six tickets for one table. Another reason to count covers, not bills.
What to do with it
Put the three figures (lunch, dinner, bar) in a simple sheet every week, with the covers next to them. After a few weeks you will see the normal range for each service, and that range is your starting point. Measuring a clean baseline before changing anything is a topic of its own, and the next post in this series covers it.
This is the method Otra Ronda uses: the number comes from your till, split by service, worked out with the same rules before and after training. If you cannot measure it from the till, you cannot say whether anything worked.